
"Come on, Jerry, the accumulators are crackling with barely restrained power," Chuck shouted.
"Here I come."
Jerry entered the shed and closed and locked the door carefully behind him, for there were discoveries
and yetunpatented inventions here that would set the largest corporations in the land to licking their lips. It
just so happened that these two young men, still students at a secluded State College in drowsy
Pleasantville, had two of the keenest minds in the country, perhaps the entire world. Tall, dark-haired,
broad-shouldered Jerry Courteney, handsome as a Greek god with a whimsical smile forever playing
about his lips, would never be taken for the topnotch engineer that he was, the man who walked off with
every medal and every award in every field that he chose to study. He looked less like a scholar than the
rugged frontiersman he really was, for he had been born up on the far northern border of our country, on
a homesteaded ranch in Alaska north of the Arctic Circle. In that rough environment he had grown up
with his four strapping brothers and strapping father, who strapped them all quite well when they got out
of line, as high-spirited boys ever will. The others were all still there, hewing a precarious living from the
virgin wilderness, but much as he loved the icy silences and whispering trees, Jerry had been bitten by the
bug of knowledge, just as his arms were bitten by the ravenous mosquitoes so his skin was tougher than
shoe leather, and had made his way from school to school, scholarship to scholarship until he reached
State College.
Chuck van Chider, no less of a genius, had had a far easier time of it. A blond giant of man with arms
as thick as a strong man's legs, he was the heart and spirit of the State Stegasauri, the championship
football team, the man who could open a hole in any line, who could carry the ball through any number of
grappling foe. When he remembered to. Twice during the last season he had stopped stock still with the
game surging around him as a solution to a complicated mathematical problem suddenly presented itself
to him. He went on to win these games, so his teammates never minded the blank moments, and he was
also the heir to the van Chider millions which also did not make him any enemies. Born with a platinum
spoon in his mouth, his father had prospected a platinum mine on the very spot where the Pleasantville
Mental Hospital now stood; he had never known want. Before the mine had played out, the shrewd
Chester van Chider had sold out and used the money to buy the tiny cheese works outside of town. By
the addition of inert ingredients and deliquescing agents to the sturdy cheese he had built a world wide
market for Van Chider Cheddar - and a fortune for himself. Though discontented radicals from the
lunatic fringe often said his cheese tasted like rancid sealing wax, the public at large loved it, mostly for its
deliquescing agents which absorbed water from the atmosphere so that after a few days, if you didn't eat
fast enough, you had more cheese than you started with. Chester van Chider was a shrewd businessman,
unlike the greedy operators who bought his platinum mine only to have it play out a few weeks later, this
blow being so great that most of them ended up in the aforementioned looney bin built on the minesite.
The keen business mind of the father was reflected in the mathematical genius of the son.
In some ways as different as night and day, blond and dark-haired, wiry and stocky, the two friends
were very much alike inside. They had strong hearts and rugged digestions - and minds that were as keen
as any that could be found. All around them, in the cluttered laboratory that had once been a simple shed,
lay the fruits of their mutual genius. A tossed-aside bit of breadboard circuitry that would one day
revolutionize long-line transmission of electricity, a bit of scribbled paper that elaborated a simple
equation for squaring the circle. These were the playthings of their ever-curious minds - and their latest
plaything now filled the room and hummed with life. A massive, hulking, 89,000-volt particle accelerator
that they had put together from surplus electromagnets and a rusty water boiler. High-density batteries of
their own invention brimmed full of electricity, and all that was required now was to throw the great gang
switch to send the charged particles smashing into the target. "Put the rubidium on the target area, will
you?" Chuck called out, busily at work adjusting a meter, his thick, strong fingers as delicate as those of a
master watchmaker at the precise job.